ON IMMANUEL KANT'S ANNIVERSARY

There are also less turbulent and less widespread inclinations, which at the same time necessarily lead to recklessness, such as the passion for building, collecting paintings, bibliomania. A man with corrupted tastes loses his nature and loves everything.

The opposite of a reckless man is a man of reason; he who is generally alien to all recklessness is wise. Such a wise man can only be found on the moon, whose inhabitants may have no passions and infinitely greater intelligence. A man who is not susceptible to anything is protected from folly by his stupidity, but to the mob he appears to be a wise man. On a ship during a storm, when everyone was terrified and thinking only of themselves, Pyrrho noticed a pig eating quietly from a trough and said: “Such must be the serenity of a wise man.” The unconcerned man is Pyrrho’s wise man.

A sign of coarse taste today is the desire to wear as much jewelry as possible; the finest taste is now characterized by simplicity.

Laborious learning or painful pondering, even if a woman should greatly succeed in it, destroy the merits that are proper to her sex, and because of their rarity they can make of her an object of cold admiration; but at the same time they will weaken the charms with which she exercises her great power over the other sex. A woman who has a head full of Greek, like Mme Dacier, or carries on fundamental controversies about mechanics, like the Marquise du Châtelet, might as well even have a beard; for perhaps that would express more obviously the mien of profundity for which she strives.

The first kind of inequality is the inequality between man and child, man and woman. The man, because he is strong and they are weak, considers himself guilty in some way if he does not sacrifice something for them.

With my highly sensitive nervous system, medicine is always poison to me. The only thing I really need sometimes, though seldom, when acidity torments me in the morning, is half a teaspoonful of cinchona bark tincture, which I find much more effective than any kind of absorption.

The thinking man feels a sadness that can lead him to a moral degradation of which the foolish man is unaware, namely, dissatisfaction with the Providence that governs the course of world events, when it sums up the disasters that oppress the human race without (it seems) hope for the best. On the other hand, it is of the utmost importance to be satisfied with Providence (even if it has destined us to follow such a difficult path on earth); we can achieve this partly by self-encouragement in difficult moments, and partly by attributing our misfortunes, instead of blaming them on fate, to our own fault, which may be the only cause of them, and by seeking help in self-improvement.

It is unnatural for a man to spend his life teaching a child how to live.

An elderly woman who behaves modestly and kindly in society, who engages in cheerful and intelligent conversation, who patronizes the amusements of youth with the necessary tact without taking part in them herself, who shows pleasure and favor in the amusements surrounding her, who shows care for everything - such a woman is still a more delicate being than a man of the same age, and perhaps even more attractive than a young girl, though in a different sense. Admittedly, such platonic love as one ancient philosopher was describing, seems strange to us: "Grace dwells in her wrinkles, and my soul, as if hovering at my lips, when I kiss her withered lips. In such a case, this claim must be abandoned. An old man who plays the role of a lover is a fop, while similar desires of an old woman are disgusting. If we behave unseemly, it is not nature that is to blame, but the desire to pervert it.

If we now take a quick look through the other parts of the world, we find the Arab to be the noblest human being in the Orient, although with a feeling that very much degenerates into the adventurous. He is hospitable, generous, and truthful; but his tale and history and in general his sentiment always has something marvelous woven into it. His inflamed power of imagination presents things to him in unnatural and distorted images, and even the spread of his religion was a great adventure. If the Arabs are as it were the Spaniards of the Orient, then the Persians are the Frenchmen of Asia. They are good poets, courtly and of rather fine taste. They are not such strict observers of Islam and allow their cast of mind, inclined to gaiety, a rather mild interpretation of the Koran. The Japanese can be regarded as it were as the Englishmen of this part of the world, although hardly in any other attribute than their steadfastness, which degenerates into the most extreme stiff-neckedness, their courage and their contempt of death. Otherwise they demonstrate few marks of a finer feeling. The Indians have a dominant taste for grotesqueries of the land that comes down to the adventurous. Their religion consists of grotesqueries. Images of idols of enormous shape, the priceless tooth of the mighty ape Hanuman, the unnatural atonements of the Fakirs (heathen mendicant monks), etc., are in this taste. The voluntary sacrifice of the wives in the very same pyre that consumes the corpse of her husband is a repulsive adventure. What ridiculous grotesqueries do the verbose and studied compliments of the Chinese not contain: even their paintings are grotesque and represent marvelous and unnatural shapes, the likes of which are nowhere to be found in the world. They also have venerable grotesqueries, for the reason that they are of ancient usage, and no people in the world has more of them than this one.

Decorum is the false noble; splendor is the false imaginary; adorned is the false beautiful.

The inclination to drink is not so base as gluttony, for drinking is a means of sociability and talkativeness, and contributes to the excitement of man, and in this respect it can be excused; but when drinking exceeds this degree, it becomes the vice of drunkenness. Drunkenness, therefore, since it is based on convivial drinking, always remains a beastly vice, but it is not as despicable as gluttony, which is much lower, because gluttony does not contribute to conviviality or to the vitalization of the body, but only reveals the animal nature. Drinking and intoxication in solitude are equally reprehensible, for then the reason that slightly elevated it above gluttony is gone.

It must be recognized that the greatest misfortunes which befall well-bred nations are the consequences of war, and not so much the consequences of the war which is now going on or which has taken place, but of the incessant and even incessantly increasing preparations for a future war. All the energies of the State, all the fruits of its culture, which could be used to spread it even more widely, are being spent on it; freedom is being severely curtailed in many places, and the maternal care of the State for its individual members is being expressed in inexorably strict demands, which are also justified by the interests of external security. But could this culture, the close connection of public interests for the mutual promotion of well-being, exist, could the population even enjoy that portion of freedom which, though under very restrictive laws, still remains, if this constant threat of war did not compel the supreme rulers of states to this respect for humanity? The example of China is convincing enough, which, after having once really experienced a kind of unforeseen attack, had no powerful enemy and in which every trace of freedom was erased. Thus, in the stage of culture at which mankind is still standing, war is an inevitable means of promoting its development, and only when (God knows when) a complete culture is reached could a permanent peace be beneficial to us, and only on that condition would it be possible.

A woman does not reveal herself easily; for this reason she doesn’t get drunk. Because she is weak, she is clever.

In everything that is to excite a lively convulsive laugh there must be something absurd (in which the Understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction). Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.

A man can attract the fair sex with strong passion, a woman with quiet tenderness.

In this way the product of a genius (as regards what is to be ascribed to genius and not to possible learning or schooling) is an example, not to be imitated (for then that which in it is genius and constitutes the spirit of the work would be lost), but to be followed, by another genius; whom it awakens to a feeling of his own originality and whom it stirs so to exercise his art in freedom from the constraint of rules, that thereby a new rule is gained for art, and thus his talent shows itself to be exemplary.

Beautiful is that which is recognized without concepts to be the object of a necessary pleasure.